Axelrod: Obama may have let Mitt get away with too much

10/4/12 12:20 PM EDT

Senior adviser David Axelrod acknowledged that President Obama may have let Mitt Romney off the hook too much on Wednesday.

"What the president hoped to avoid was a situation where you had two politicians standing there insulting each other instead of offering ideas for the future of the country, but you know, you have to strike a balance," Axelrod said in a conference call with reporters. "You can't allow someone to stand there and basically manhandle the truth about their own record and ideas and about yours and not deal with that. I'm sure that is a takeaway from this debate."

The president largely skipped many of the points in his regular stump speech during the debate, including women's issues and the auto industry bailout, and he seemed taken back by Romney at times. Axelrod suggested that he was.

"This was the first chance for the president to see how Gov. Romney operates in these debates first hand," he said. "You have to make some adjustments to the fact that, you know, he is kind of a serial,…artful dodger. That makes it a more challenging kind of event."

He compared the final stretch of the race to playoffs in sports and signaled Obama is eager to get back on the field with Romney during the next debate on Oct. 16.

"We're going to have to make some judgments as to where to draw the lines in these debates and how to use our time," Axelrod said. "In terms of changes and such, these things are always, you know its like the playoffs in sports. You evaluate after every contest and you make adjustments, and I'm sure that we will make adjustments. I don’t see us adding huge amounts of additional prep time, but I think there's some strategic judgments that have to be made and we’ll make them."